1. Field of Invention
The present disclosure provides a multi-color, co-planar indicium that is applied to an object or its packaging to track and/or authenticate the object, and to thwart counterfeiting. The present disclosure further provides a method and system using the multi-color, co-planar indicium for tracking and/or authentication requiring individualized combinations of chemical pigments, light energy sources, and spectral filters to create a sophisticated level of encryption. Bitmap masks may be used to increase the accuracy, precision and speed of the printing process used to print the multi-color indicium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, brand security has become an important issue. The production of counterfeit goods has been rapidly increasing and reaches across a wide range of products. In many instances, the quality of the counterfeit goods is significantly poorer that the original and cannot be safely used in the intended manner.
Another problem is diversion of authentic goods from their intended point of sale, which can manifest itself where there are regional wholesale price differentials for the same goods. The supply chain in such circumstances may be circuitous and difficult to monitor. Some of the goods may not have been intended for sale in a particular country and, when diverted, actually compete with legitimate products intended for that country.
Greater pressure is being felt by brand owners to take responsibility for the safety of their products and for knowing that the end user is purchasing a legitimate product. A sophisticated, yet standardized method for authentication and for tracking and tracing products is needed.
Existing track-and-trace systems involve printing a mark that is encoded with unique information on an object or its packaging, so that the individual object or packaging can be tracked through the supply chain. Examples of marks include one-dimensional (1-D) and two-dimensional (2-D) barcodes, such as Code 128, UPC, Aztec, DataMatrix and PDF barcodes. These barcodes are in wide use because the barcodes can be used royalty-free, and because there are commercially-available devices that can encode, print, detect, read and decode these indicia. Some favorable attributes of these marks are high information density, small physical size, and error correction capability.
A matrix code is a two-dimensional way of representing information. An example of a matrix code is a two-dimensional (2-D) barcode. A 2-D barcode is similar to the one-dimensional (1-D, or linear) barcode, such as the familiar UPC code used to track groceries, but a 2-D barcode permits greater data representation density than a 1-D barcode.
In practical terms, there are problems when using currently-available systems to produce a printable mark. Part of the difficulty is that some attributes of the systems are necessarily in direct conflict with each other. For example, the mark ideally needs to be as small as possible (to be more difficult for an unauthorized user to locate), but its information content needs to be high. Another problem is the difficulty in printing such marks on a high-speed packaging line with sufficient dots per inch (DPI), without smearing the mark due to box-to-box rubbing, lack of drying time, substrate adhesion issues, and surface porosity, particularly given the wide variety of substrates and coatings on which the mark is applied.
Another problem with currently-available systems is that a mark cannot be easily read and decoded by commercially-available electronic image readers when printed as a covert mark or indicium (that is, invisible under normal lighting conditions or blended into the color of the substrate onto which the indicium is printed) because of a lack of sufficient contrast ratio. The same rules for decoding images apply to covert cases as well as the traditional black marks on white substrates: i.e., sufficient resolution, contrast ratio, clarity of print, and uniformity of signal are required.
Printing a co-planar indicium or mark having multiple colors of inks involves additional registration requirements, where the term “registration” means the accurate positioning and alignment of the printer head with the substrate onto which the indicium is printed. The problem of accurate registration of the substrate is particularly acute for a multi-color indicium because adjacent colors may otherwise overlap or bleed into each other, thereby interfering with accurate reading and decoding.
The improving sophistication of counterfeiters and unauthorized users to locate and copy and/or replicate an indicium, particularly when combined with rapidly-improving printing technologies, has led to the need to create a more sophisticated system having many more chemical and coding permutations than are currently available, without sacrificing ease of use, economy, or accuracy when used by an authorized user.
Thus, it is desired to develop a method and system for tracking and/or authenticating articles using a multi-color, co-planar indicium that is easy to apply, detect, read, and decode by an authorized user, and yet possesses a high level of encryption so as to be extremely difficult to replicate or copy by an unauthorized user or counterfeiter.
The desired method and system to achieve this goal would have the flexibility to use many different chemical pigments and/or dyes from a wide variety of suppliers. It is also desirable that, wherever possible, the hardware and associated software used be “commercial off-the-shelf” (COTS) products, to take advantage of the tremendous advances in these technologies, as well as their low cost.
It would also be desirable for such a system to accommodate a large number of combinations of chemical dyes/pigments, light sources, and spectral filters. In this way, am individual customer could receive a “custom” system having an individualized, secret combination of a plurality of inks incorporating taggants consisting of pigmented and/or dyed inks, light sources and spectral filters. The system should also be flexible in order to accommodate future developments in chemical inputs, barcode types, light sources, and spectral filters. Further, the customer should be able to make minor changes to the system relatively inexpensively, such as changing a spectral filter set. In addition, the system also would have the capacity to take advantage of a high signal-to-noise ratio for the indicium. The present disclosure describes a method and system that accomplishes these desired goals, as well as disclosing a multi-color, co-planar indicium used therein.